As an Armstrong student, I need to stay aware of all things happening on campus. I like to know when there are events to maintain a social life. I try to keep a detailed schedule so I know when my work is due for each class (and how long I have to procrastinate for each assignment).

It’s also good to know what the Galley is serving, so I can escape my at-home fortress of ramen noodles. Finally, I like to know how my peers are doing, especially when it’s about how they are living.

The Inkwell asked many of you a series of questions regarding your living arrangements and the quality of on-campus housing.

Is on-campus housing truly worth it? This is the question that we set out to answer.

We set out to ask you all the following: ‘How satisfied are you with campus housing?’, ‘How often do you have problems with utilities?’ and ‘How efficient is campus housing fixing maintenance problems in the dorms?’ The results are shown here in Figure 1:

Figure 1. Overall satisfaction of campus housing per randomly selected sample size of 69 (30 on-campus and 39 off-campus) Armstrong students in ‘overall satisfaction, ‘frequency of utility issues,’ and ‘maintenance efficiency.’

As you can see from the pie charts above, only 20% of the respondents stated that they were satisfied with on-campus housing. An even smaller minority indicated being highly satisfied with Armstrong’s housing.

Together, both highly satisfied and satisfied respondents equated to a value of 23.3%. The other 76.7% of respondents indicated: average, unsatisfied, or highly unsatisfied with on-campus housing.

The indicator, ‘average,’ took the most votes with a value of 40%, while the other 36.7% of survey takers indicated that they were either unsatisfied or highly unsatisfied with Armstrong’s housing.

The pie chart titled ‘frequency of utility issues’ shows a 50-50 indication between those who experience issues with on-campus utilities and those who do not.

Finally, the graph titled maintenance efficiency indicates that 36.7% of respondents have an average experience with the efficiency of maintenance 33.3% of respondents indicated that their experience with maintenance was either inefficient or highly inefficient, and 30% of respondents indicated that it was either highly efficient or just efficient.

Collectively, this data indicates that on-campus housing is relatively average.

This matches up with a follow-up question: ‘would you recommend living on campus?’ 60% of respondents replied with ‘yes,’ 30% replied with ‘no,’ and 10% were inconclusive. This indicates that more than half of students living on campus would recommend living on campus to off-campus students.

Finally, moving on to our off-campus respondents, we noticed that 82% of respondents indicated that they lived anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes away from school. Breaking it down further, 31% of students commute 5 to 10 minutes, 23% commute 11 to 20 minutes, and 26% commute 21 to 30 minutes. The other 18% of students indicated that their commute to school was more than 30 minutes.

If so many students live so close, why aren’t they just staying on campus? When we asked, ‘why don’t you live on campus?’

8% described that cost was the reason, 10% described the quality of dorms, 54% described family, 18% described others, and 10% were inconclusive. This was from a sample of 39 students in which 13% had lived on campus, 79% had never lived on campus, and 8% were not indicated.
When asked ‘would you ever consider living on campus?’18% said yes, 77% said no, and 5% were inconclusive. This shows that most off-campus people do not wish to live on campus.

Overall, this data indicates that the experience of living on campus is average to relatively undesirable. Many of the students who live on campus would recommend living on campus to their off-campus counterparts, whereas most off-campus students would rather stay away from on-campus housing.